It's the little number times two

Friday

Jun 6, 2014 at 6:00 AM

According to town officials in Clinton, Monday night's approval of radio and communications gear for the Fire Department had to be overturned for want of a calculator with adequate digits after the decimal point.

When officials punched in the 131 votes for and 66 votes against, the calculator did all it could and spat back 0.67, apparently meeting the two-thirds requirement for passage of the article.

On Wednesday, officials said the actual figure — 0.6649 — is short of two-thirds.

But really, any schoolchild could have done this math in his or her head. A two-thirds vote means there have to be two ayes for every nay. There were 66 nays. Double that and you have 132 ayes. Obviously, that's one more than 131.

Clinton could probably use a more sophisticated calculator for the next town meeting. But in simple matters such as these, a bit of elementary mathematics would do just as well.